Puberty blocker ruling hasn’t solved Scotland’s gender problem
by Victoria Smith, UnHerd:
So it turns out that Scottish children are no more suitable for medical experimentation than English ones. Yesterday NHS Scotland responded to the Cass Review by pausing the prescription of puberty blockers for gender-confused children and — in a move that goes further than its English counterpart — halting cross-sex hormones for under-18s.
This is a tremendous relief and, to some of us, a surprise. As Dr Hilary Cass noted, evidence-based care for vulnerable children has been disrupted by those who prefer “a social justice model”. Being in favour of the sterilisation of autistic and gay children — or “protecting trans kids”, as it’s been known — has long been a way to advertise one’s right-side-of-history credentials. It has also, in the eyes of certain Scottish politicians, been a way to indicate that one’s own country is young, progressive, and forward-looking, rather than mired in stuffy old principles such as “child safeguarding”.
It would have been a tragedy if, yet again, adults were permitted to sacrifice the health and future wellbeing of children for the sake of their own egos. Even so, the announcement on the Sandyford Gender Service website leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no shame, no apology, seemingly no awareness that if you are indeed lacking “evidence of safety and long-term impact” for the therapies you have already been prescribing, you are complicit in doing harm. The language is oh-so-neutral.
Apparently, none of this means practitioners are not “committed to providing the best possible clinical care”. It’s just pure coincidence that even someone like me, with no medical qualifications, suspected that there was a problem years ago. There are only so many videos of homophobic mothers describing the “fixing” of their children that a person can tolerate (let’s be honest: it should only take one).
Read also: Correcting Cass’s critics by Nathan Williams, Artillery Row
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